0700 What four value chains define engagement, and the next five years of innovation and investment?

Next to last in the content supply chain, we have multimedia asset management. This operational capability comprises an extensive upstream workflow for image capture or acquisition from multiple sources, including staff photographers, newswires, advertisers, publicity firms, and users with their own user-generated photos and videos. Multimedia asset management also includes an upstream workflow for ads using PDFs, XMP, and job description format or JDF data.

Multimedia asset management also defines the work of DAM operations, a distinct set of systems, processes, and accountabilities for creating and maintaining a metadata framework and faceted metadata model as well as overall Q&A for ingesting and posting of new assets and maintenance or archiving of obsolete or retired digital assets.

Finally, we have scheduling and collaboration platform - the head or point of origin of the content supply chain.

Collaboration must now move from a one-off activity and become a truly company-wide competency and measured in terms of business process benchmarks. Lot to say here. I guess we’ll get to that later.

However, we have found that scheduling remains the weakest like in many content supply chains. Think of individual content files or media assets as all of the airplanes flying in the air, sitting on the tarmac, or in a hangar getting maintained.

Most firms do not have an air traffic control system; they have little or no visibility of what’s online across all their points of presence, especially in social media spaces. And they have no visibility into the current workflow load-balance or capacities of the content supply chains. People just do stuff. Management does really understand who does what, nor do they understand the constraints or capacities of the content supply chain. When the stuff hits the fan, boatload of people stay up all night and get stuff done. However, if management knew the true cost - I mean out of pocket, operational cost of a blind scheduling function in the content supply chain, well, you might be able to achieve efficiencies of 25 to 40 percent - fewer headcount and less money spent to get the current work of the content supply chain done.

Okay, the current state of many content supply chains entails a basic activity map; I have encounter few firms that really understand what all that activity means; what type of brand impressions and reactions to a value proposition, by whom and why.

With the exception of those firms with a strong ecommerce capability or a strong dynamic messaging and newsletter capability, most firms just see a lot of dumb activity by anonymous users. Okay, that’s better than no activity; it’s just not enough.

Now over here, to the left we have Social Media Operations, a completely new ecosystem emerging.

Now, our best estimate suggests that Social Media Operations begins with what we call Multichannel Marketing Analytics, the convergence of three analytic practices: 1) Traditional database analytics and stalwart of direct mail and database modeling; 2) Web analytics with SEO and ad words; 3) Social media analytics that enable brand marketers and corporate communications to track conversations and sentiments about their firm, products, or markets among millions of blogs, social networks, forums, and so on.

So, Multichannel Marketing Analytics represents the next big shock to the marketing ecosystem: it will provide hard-data feedback about the effectiveness of advertising, marketing, and engagement. Multichannel Marketing Analytics will quantify engagement and “stories that connect”

Let’s take a moment and see how this has begun to take shape. First, a brand marketer want to engage a youth market segment or technical specification decision-maker segment (typically a young adult male in a professional workplace). Second, this marketer concludes that the existing marcom or advertising groups lack cool; they produce really corporate stuff that just doesn’t appeal to the young adults. Third, this enterprising marketer hires a guerilla marketing agency; a group will proven success and hard data to prove it. Then, it gets interesting.

The guerilla marketing agency creates a series of viral video spots or as they say “vspots”. The agency typically posts two to seven spots per week to YouTube or other video sharing sites, adding descriptive metadata and tags - what many call a “folksomony.” The online marketing community calls this “organic seeding” of viral videos or vspots.

Then a social media agency performs a function similar to media planners such as Carat but planning and placing ad spots; only a social media agency places viral video spots just in social media: blogs and social networking sites.

Wow. The placement of paid viral video spots makes willing blogs effective brand ambassadors.

For that reason, we offer a certified brand ambassador program, attracting and certifying bloggers, consultants, and other brand-information intermediaries on behalf of our clients.

TITLE:
Long Tails Wag Big Dogs

SUBTITLE:
How the synthesis of professional and user-generated content will continue transforming media, entertainment, publishing, and marketing

KEY TOPIC:
How digital asset management speed convergence of professional and user-generated content

PRESENTATION DATE:
12 May 2008

VENUE:
Henry Stewart’s DAM and MOM Symposium, New York, NY USA